1. Technical Field of Endeavor
The present invention is generally directed to the field of computing and more specifically to the field of information processing, and even more specifically, to the field of high-demand, high-performance, and supercomputing.
2. Description of the Related Art
The ability to use computers to process extremely complex or large amounts of stored information and derive new useful information from that information previously stored has assumed an important role in many organizations. The computer-aided methods used to store and derive information vary, but the vast majority of such methods depend on a general purpose computing hardware architecture. Accordingly, the potential to craft an optimal solution to a computing problem is limited by a static hardware architecture that is optimized not for any specific computing task, but rather to provide an acceptable level of processing ability over a wide and disparate range of computing tasks.
Attempts to create optimal solutions to solve specific and complex information processing tasks have focused on creating hardware architectures designed to exploit various features of the information to be processed so that such processing can be performed in an optimal manner. Hardware devices containing specialized vector processing units are one such example. Software written for such hardware formats the information into a form that takes advantage of the hardware's specialization, thus creating a computing environment that is tailored to the specific problem at hand. Such tailored solutions are usually implemented on high-end supercomputing hardware architectures with specialized software. Consequently, this approach is prohibitively expensive for most organizations, often costing millions of dollars. Additionally, once created, tailored solutions of this type are only suitable for a specific problem or class of problems.
The software written to solve specific high-performance computing problems is necessarily constrained by the features of the hardware upon which such software runs. When such software is in machine-readable form, it is tightly coupled to a specific architecture upon which it will run. Further, the underlying hardware machine architecture is almost always static, and only reconfigurable (and only partially so) in a few non-commercial machines not widely available. Even the so-called grid (or network or large-cluster) computing approaches, which rely on large numbers of interconnected physical or virtual machines, are still constrained by running on a few different types of conventional processors. While the topology of the network can be configurable in such approaches, the architecture of the underlying processors is static, and thus not tailored to the problem at hand.
The concept of a virtual supercomputer addresses these shortcomings. The virtual supercomputer provides a conceptual, reconfigurable hardware architecture for high-performance machine-readable software. The conceptual hardware architecture masks the actual underlying hardware from the machine-readable software, and exposes to the software a virtual machine reconfigurable for the problem at hand. The virtual supercomputer thus provides to the software the operations needed for optimal processing, unconstrained by the overhead associated with those hardware operations of the underlying machine that are not relevant to the task. This not only speeds the computing required for the problem, but also importantly, it dramatically speeds the process of software application development, as the developer can write program code to a machine that directly processes operations specifically optimized for the problem to be solved.
The virtual supercomputer translates the software instructions from the format for the virtual machine into a format that a particular underlying hardware architecture can process. Each specific hardware architecture must have a specific virtual machine associated with it. Thus, software for the virtual supercomputer can run on a wide variety of hardware architectures, because the virtual machine for each specific hardware architecture provides the same conceptual hardware architecture for software developers. Therefore, a large investment in a supercomputer or supercomputing cluster, with attendant maintenance and obsolescence issues, is avoided. Further, unlike a grid or conventional network computing system, which increases power in a brute-force manner by simply adding more processors, each virtual machine in a virtual supercomputer network has an internally configurable architecture, thus magnifying the power of the virtual supercomputer to provide a tailored solution.
One embodiment of some portions of the virtual supercomputer is described in the pending application Knowledge-based e-catalog procurement system and method, listed in the CROSS-REFERENCE section of this application.